Call for Submissions

Submit your Tribute to Samuel R. Delanyby April 1, 2017

Moonstone is celebrating Samuel R. Delany with a Tribute Chapbook.

If Chip has been important to you, if you love his writing, if he has affected you in some way, write a praise poem or something that reflects your relationship to him and his writing. Chip will be 75 on April 1, 2017, so this is a birthday celebration as well.

The Moonstone 2016 Chapbook Contest Winner

Vernita Hall

“In a broad display of approaches in craft, the poet visits the history of Philadelphia in a manner reminiscent of steampunk aesthetics. Jules Verne meets W.E.B. DuBois in a time traveling romp back and forth from The Souls of Black Folk to today’s evening news. This is fresh and ambitious writing, a collection that brings a view eschewing nostalgia and romanticized ways of looking at history. Instead it plops the reader squarely in the present with the past as a spectator looking on with renewed wisdom. Voices in the formation of the A.M.E. church and Bill Cosby’s lost son find a common place here, along with many other subjects, subjects making a diverse populace.” Afaa Weaver

Runners up: Cathleen Cohen – “The achievement here is to speak out of a celebration of the formation of imagery itself. The process of the appearance of an image made by some original thing is made even more fascinating in these poems.”

Sean Webb –“A compassionate look at what the food industry does to animals and humans, these poems form a clear appeal to a deeper justice. The song is one of sincerity.”

SaturdayApril16,2016

BrandywineWorkshop,728S.BroadStreet

Poetry as Personal History ­

A Day of Workshops

Workshops are 75 minutes with 15 minutes between them

“… the relationship between the craft of poetry and memoir and their reliance upon its intuitive nature. Perhaps this ethereal concept can be better understood in Melvillian terms. In Moby Dick Melville describes the inner life as fluid rather than linear. “There is no steady unretracing progress in this life: we do not advance through fixed gradations. . . . But once gone through, we trace the round again; and are infants, boys, and men, and Ifs eternally.” A successful work of art retains this sense of fluidity. It contains the hills and valleys of experience. The reader enters the narrative or lyric, shaped by the author’s hand, and is witness to not only what is said, but the mystery and miracle of what exists in the white space or as Wallace Stevens wrote: “The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” from The Unreasoning Mask by Jill Bialosky

9:00am ­Registration

10:00am – John Balaban

John Balaban is the author of twelve books of poetry and prose, including four volumes which together have won The Academy of American Poets’ Lamont prize, a National Poetry Series Selection, and two nominations for the National Book Award. His Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems won the 1998 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2003, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. and in 2005, he was a judge for the National Book Awards. His latest books of poetry are Path, Crooked Path, (2006) and Like Family, a chapbook (2009). In addition to writing poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, he is a translator of Vietnamese poetry, and a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. In 1999, with two Vietnamese friends, he founded the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (http://nomfoundation.org). In 2008, he was awarded a medal from the Ministry of Culture of Vietnam for his translations of poetry and his leadership in the restoration of the ancient text collection at the National Library. Balaban is Professor Emeritus of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

11:30 –Gregory Corbin

Lincoln University graduate and Philadelphia native, Gregory Corbin Jr., is the Founder and Executive Director of Philly Youth Poetry Movement. He is an award-winning international poet, motivational speaker, activist, teacher, and humanitarian. With over ten years of extensive classroom and community experience mentoring and educating youth, Corbin seeks to close generation gaps and foster healthy communication within communities.

Corbin is an accomplished artist who has performed from South Carolina to South Africa. He has shared stages with India Arie, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Saul Williams, Sonia Sanchez and many other powerful artists. Corbin has been featured at schools, conferences, and festivals. He has discussed youth advocacy and empowerment on TED talks, HBO, CNN, CSPAN, BET and other networks. He is the recipient of the Knight Foundation’s BMe award.

Corbin currently serves on the Mayor’s Commission for African America Males, along with the Poet Laureate and Youth Poet Laureate Commission. He is dedicated to providing youth with the tools for becoming lifelong learners, self-advocates, and agents of social change who will shape the future. Corbin believes that when we invest in the voices of the youth, we are in turn investing in the voices of the future.

2:00 ­ Afaa M. Weaver

“Weaver offers up poems that accomplish the rare feat of describing both a foreign land—the whole spectra of people, places, traditions insofar as such can be bottled up in poems and transmitted to a reader. However, he does much more: he flawlessly incorporates his own personal history and personal struggles with his explorations of Asia and in doing so, makes his poetry all the richer instead of truncating or lessening either his autobiographical approach nor his geographical journey. City of Eternal Spring is rich, and deep, yet accessible to the reader who is willing to approach it. We need more poetry of this tenor, more poetry that is able to interrogate cultural traditions but without the normal tropes of a poet pigeon-holed into a certain ethnic, national, or other tradition: a poet, as Weaver proves himself, who is truly a traveler.” ~ Mike Walker, “Coal Hill Review”

“In these nuanced, sobering, and beautifully cadenced poems, the poet tries to deal with haunting, mysterious voices of past, present, and future—whether of fear, anxiety, joy, love, or hope. Reconciling East and West, he achieves solacing harmony and tranquility. A marvelous work.” –Ching-Hsi Perng, President of Taipei Chinese Club, on The Government of Nature

“The Kingsley Tufts Award is one of the most prestigious prizes a poet can win, and I’m delighted to see it go to Afaa. His father was a sharecropper. After serving for two years in the Army, he toiled for fifteen years in factories, writing poems all the while. When he learned that he’d won a National Endowment Fellowship, he quit his job and attended Brown University on a full scholarship. He essentially invented himself from whole cloth as a poet. It’s truly remarkable.” Chase Twichell, Chief Judge, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award 2014, presented for The Government of Nature, “City of Eternal Spring , [winner of the Phillis Wheatley Award for excellence in poetry at the 2015 Harlem Book Fair, is the final book in Afaa Michael Weaver’s Plum Flower Trilogy. The two earlier books, The Plum Flower Dance: Poems 1985 to 2005 and The Government of Nature, reveal similar themes that address the author’s personal experience with childhood abuse through the context of Daoist renderings of nature as a metaphor for the human body, with an eye to recovery and forgiveness in a very eclectic spiritual life. City of Eternal Spring chronicles Weaver’s travels abroad in Taiwan and China, as well as showing the limits of cultural influence.” -University of Pittsburgh Press

3:30pm ­ Amy Small-­McKinney

Amy Small-McKinney is the author of Life is Perfect, and two chapbooks of poetry, Body of Surrender and Clear Moon, Frost. She was nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, such as The American Poetry Review, Tiferet Journal, The Cortland Review, The Pedestal Magazine, LIPS Magazine, upstreet, SAND, Berlin’s English Literary Journal, and anthologies, including Veils, Halos, Shackles: International Poetry on Oppression and Empowerment of Women, and Main Street Rag, Voices from the porch. Small-McKinney was guest editor for the June 2006 issue of The Pedestal Magazine and recipient of the 2011 Toni Brown Memorial Scholarship, judged by several poets, including Peter Murphy and J. C. Todd. She was the 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, selected by poet, Christopher Bursk: “I was immediately won over by the complexity of the language in the deceptively local poem Dillsburg, PA, a poem hardly provincial in its immersion of us in the syntax and in the setting. This poet is not afraid to try all the tools available in poetry, all the ways it can take form on the page, all the ways it can tease and mystify and provoke us…”

Her poetry was part of a collaboration of women artists and poets for the project, The Poetry Dress, at the 2011 Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Several poems written during cancer treatment are to be published in an anthology, Bared. During her tenure as 2011 Montgomery County Poet Laureate, Amy founded a program using creative writing for healing. “Often, the only relief I’d get from fear and worry was to sit down and write. I did not try to write perfect poems. I wanted to be allowed to say anything. And it was the only time during day or night when I felt some sense of relief. So I just kept writing through the whole process. I didn’t even know if they were poems yet. I didn’t care if they were poems. I just knew it was the only place I could feel some sense of control. During the chemo, when I was really sick, I didn’t write as often, but it was always there for me. It was a ladder out of this well, this cave. I was drowning and it was my ladder out. So I’m grateful to poetry.” from an interview on April 22nd, 2015 in The Breast Cancer Journey.

5:00 pm – Sonia Sanchez

Poet. Mother. Professor. National and International lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. Sponsor of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Board Member of MADRE. First Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, Sonia Sanchez is the author of over 16 books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have Lions?, Like the Singing Coming off the Drums, Shake Loose My Skin, and most recently, Morning Haiku. In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. BMA: The Sonia Sanchez Literary Review is the first African American Journal that discusses the work of Sonia Sanchez and the Black Arts Movement.

A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, she is a winner of the 1985 American Book Award for Homegirls and Handgrenades, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities for 1988, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom (W.I.L.P.F.) for 1989, a PEW Fellowship in the Arts for 1992-1993 and the recipient of Langston Hughes Poetry Award for 1999. Does Your House Have Lions? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the Poetry Society of America’s 2001 Robert Frost Medalist and a Ford Freedom Scholar from the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. Sonia Sanchez has lectured at over 500 universities and colleges in the United States and has traveled extensively, reading her poetry in Africa, Cuba, England, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, Norway, and Canada. She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University and she held the Laura Carnell Chair in English at Temple University. She is the recipient of the Harper Lee Award, 2004, Alabama Distinguished Writer, and the National Visionary Leadership Award for 2006

Philly Loves Poetry Festival

Friday April 15, 2016 – Sonia Sanchez Day

“Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” Leonardo da Vinci

5:30 PM – Unveiling of an original limited edition print, a creative collaboration between poet Sonia Sanchez and artist Allan L. Edmunds at a reservation only reception.

The image celebrates the life and work of Ms. Sanchez and print will incorporate photographs and poetry from Ms. Sanchez’s archives in a graphic style for which Mr. Edmunds is noted. Both creatives are award winners in their disciplines and internationally recognized.

You can support Philly Loves Poetry, Moonstone and Brandywine Workshop and Archives and receive a 50% discount on this original limited edition print. For $400.00 (credit terms are available) you have the opportunity to own this original print, have your picture taken with Sonia Sanchez and the print, and have preferred seating at all Philly Loves Poetry programs. The print will be part of the Words to Wall: Peace exhibit, which opens on April 14 and runs to May 14, 2016.

Allan L. Edmunds is Founder & Director of Brandywine Workshop and Archives founded 1972 as a center for the advancement of fine art printmaking and to provide training and support for artists of all ages and backgrounds, especially artists of color and to work in collaboration with printers to mentor and train students and young artists. Brandywine Workshop is internationally recognized for excellence in printmaking and fostering the inclusion and documentation of diverse artists in the practice of printmaking through its archives, exhibitions and satellite collections in museums and universities across the country and abroad.

7:00 PM – BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez: A New Documentary

(90 minutes) A performance filled documentary about this 80-year old artist for whom writing is both a personal and political act. In BaddDDD Sonia Sanchez, Sanchez’s life unfolds in a documentary rich with readings and jazz-accompanied performances of her work. With appearances by Questlove, Talib Kweli, Ursula Rucker, Amiri Baraka, Haki Madhubuti, Jessica Care Moore, Ruby Dee, Yasiin Bey, Ayana Mathis, Imani Uzuri and Bryonn Bain, the documentary examines Sanchez’s contribution to the world of poetry, her singular place in the Black Arts Movement and her leadership role in African American culture over the last half century.

Philly Loves Poetry Festival

Thursday, April 14, 2016 – Women’s Day

6:30pm – Unsilenced: Four Women of Color

A multidisciplinary performance piece featuring poetry, songs, storytelling and music in recognition of female artists who are known to have infused their creative expressions within the framework of social change activism. For the Philly Loves Poetry Festival, Tomorrow’s Girls & Women (TGW) founder, Pat McLean, collaborates with For Women Collective (FWC) founder, Debra Powell-Wright, to offer poetic testimonies in tribute to Sonia Sanchez, Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, and Nikki Giovanni. In addition to reading the work of the four honorees, the performance artists will also share original works that demonstrate their love and respect for those who have paved the way for our collective voices to be heard. Featuring:

In January 2009, after President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law, his first legislative act after taking office, poets Carolyne Wright and Eugenia Toledo began to think about the need to hear more from women about their workplace experiences—not just pay and promotion inequity, or workplace harassment and intimidation, but all matters relevant to women and work in an increasingly globalized world, including the ever-widening range of occupations in which women are engaged, and their joy and satisfaction of work well done.

“Raising Lilly Ledbetter …gathers the lyric art of working women, writing from the depths of at least sixty-two occupations. These are the poems of the heavy-lifters, night-shifters, line and piece workers, writing with grace and often with humor: poets who punch clocks, woman the phones and decks, weave, weld and can, cotton-pick and cold call, thread-spin, typeset and teach. They sex-work, they ship-build, plaster and preach, butcher and drive the bus. This is anthology as page-turner, as fist in the air, as do-it-yourself manual against despair. Here, and in gratitude to Lily Ledbetter, is the music of a movement, and it is one of the best of our time.”- Carolyn Forché

Philly Loves Poetry Festival

Art Sanctuary, 628 S. 16th Street

Saturday April 16, 2016

Free Workshops for Students

Workshops and Readings by Theme –

Free for Students w/Proper ID

Runs concurrently with workshops at Brandywine Workshop

Panel Discussions and thematic readings – Each discussion will be 75 minutes with 15 minute intermission between them. Each panel will discuss how the subject matter affects the writing (30 minutes), the panel will perform their poetry on that theme (30 minutes) and then open the mic to the audience (15 minutes).

12:00pm – Power Chords: Music & Poetry To some poets, music is a major part of their work – both in process and in content – because music is a major part of who they are. Come hang with a few local poets as they discuss how songs, instruments, beats, musicians, and genres of music impact the writing, reading, and performance of poetry.

I live in Camden,
not exactly what people have in mind
when they sing “Home of the brave
and land of the free.”
But my angels have gotten me out
of some squeezes.
The crack-head’s knife missed my lung
by half-an-inch.A young girl once pleaded and pushed me
off a mean street in Parkside.
I had been her substitute teacher
and she called me “bad”
which meant I was “good.”

Then this gang saw me jogging
over by Camden High
and was ready to bust me up
when they saw a monkey on my hand
and realized, “Hey, this dude
is the Puppet Man.”What saves our lives:
a 6th grade girl,
a little cloth monkey,
a dull knife,
an angel’s wings
brushing through
the ghetto night.

Introduced by Editor Sean Lynch, who worked with Rocky for over two years on the book.

Copies of this chapbook can be picked up at the Moonstone office for $15.00.We will ship this title to you with a donation of $18.99. Donations accepted by Paypal or Check

Moonstone’s Latest Publication

A Roomful of Truth:

A Tribute to Lamont B. Steptoe

“The Moonstone Arts Center hosted a celebration and reception for Philadelphia poet, photographer, and publisher Lamont B. Steptoe entitled A Roomful of Truth: A Tribute to Lamont B. Steptoe, on February 6, 2016 at the Brandywine Workshop. Put together by Larry Robin at the suggestion of local author Peter Baroth and Poets and Prophets founder Bob Small, the program featured readings by Lamont himself and by contributors to the booklet of tributes and appreciations presented to him in honor of the occasion and in recognition of his many contributions to the Philadelphia cultural community. Other friends and admirers spoke and read as well. A native of Pittsburgh, Lamont’s talent was encouraged at an early age by a teacher who recognized his outstanding gifts and galvanized his own budding sense of vocation. Service in Vietnam left him with a deepened and tragic sense of experience, which he developed with further mentorship from some of the major African-American writers of the time and the inspiration of an influential spiritual ancestor, Langston Hughes. A fixture on the Philadelphia scene for more than three decades, Lamont himself has left an impressive record of mentorship in his community. This was attested at the celebration by students and fellow writers, who warmly acknowledged his unstinting generosity in sharing his gifts, his poetic example, and his personal odyssey. Lamont’s own recollections and commentary, as well as his eloquent readings, provided the culminating moments of the event. Sean Lynch, the editor of Whirlwind Magazine, served as its host. The author and/or editor of some fifteen verse collections and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including an American Book Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, Lamont Steptoe has represented and honored his adopted city as have few others. The Moonstone Arts Center takes pride in adding its own tribute to an illustrious career, still very much in progress.”